MailChimp Enters Simple Marketing Automation Market

Email service provider MailChimp is diving into the marketing automation world with its latest release, which triggers email based on specific website actions.

With MailChimp v8.8, a feature called Goal allows companies to connect website content like purchase confirmation pages or other popular pages to email that tracks customers visits.

Make a Purchase, Get an Email

Goal is a campaign tracking feature that enables auto response emails to be sent based on visitor behavior, but this mechanism will eventually extend beyond simple notifications, MailChimp CEO Ben Chestnut explained on the company blog.

Calling the initial version of Goal just a baby step, Chestnut went on to note that an upcoming release will allow for the ability to build and save segments of subscribers and then create reports on goal completion. Goal is based on a JavaScript snippet that is added to the head section of a site's HTML.

The Goal integration can also be input into marketing campaign emails, and more advanced capabilities are available to those with the technical know how. An experienced developer may be needed to build advanced trigger options like JavaScript events and wildcard delimiters, however.

JavaScript events allow autoresponses to be sent when someone submits a form or completes an e-commerce transaction, for example. Additionally, wildcards allow autoresponses to be sent to subscribers who visit different versions of a URL like a subdomain of a website.

Goal allows company's to see any goals a particular subscriber may have already completed.

Updated Pricing Tiers

Having the ability to track subscribers as they perform certain behaviors on a website is obviously desirable for marketers, and the fact that MailChimp is adding this feature shows it is serious about moving up the chain of ever larger companies that require this kind of capability.

In fact, because MailChimp is so often used by startups and small businesses, the company has recently changed its pricing. As companies grow, they invariably need more email capacity, and MailChimp now offers its products in $5 per month increments from $10 all the way up to $240.

That's based on number of subscribers with an unlimited amount of sending allowed. Prices above the $240 level continue at larger than $5 increments, without sending limits. There are also pay as you go plans and pricing for high volume monthly and CPM tiers as well. MailChimp is now adding more than 8,000 users per day, Chestnut claimed in another company blog — a fact that apparently prompted the price changes.

Besides Goal, the other added MailChimp 8.8 feature is a conversation tracker that allows customers to view replies to campaigns from within a MailChimp account.